Tony Webster
Worthington, Minnesota
A sign for Worthington, Minnesota at Lake Front Park.
Is Worthington, Minnesota, the center of the universe? No, of course not. But lately, this medium-sized town near the borders of Iowa and South Dakota feels like the cultural crossroads of America under Donald Trump.
Worthington is a farm and factory town, with a population just north of 13,000 and an origin story that connects—like so many other prairie outposts—to the nineteenth century westward expansion of the railroads. It is also centered around Lake Okabena, where herons once gathered before the industrial railroad and farming practices took over.
On November 5, Worthington residents will vote on whether or not to accept a referendum request, designed to inject nearly $30 million into the town’s swelling public schools. Without it, local reports say, Worthington’s schools will continue to grapple with overcrowded classrooms and inadequate lab and cafeteria spaces.
It will be the sixth referendum ask in the past five years; the previous requests were all rejected.
Sure, local referendums derived from property tax increases are rarely, if ever, passed with unbridled enthusiasm from residents. In an era when public funding for education has been slashed as needs have grown, towns like Worthington have had to go before voters more often to seek funds that often are desperately needed just for basic operating costs.
For school districts around the country, this gets exhausting. But in Worthington, the refusal to approve recent bonding requests is marred by overt racial and economic tensions.
This was captured in an eyebrow-raising Washington Post article written by Michael E. Miller and published in September. In his piece, Miller interviews older, white residents—especially aging farmer and school bus driver Don Brink—who are openly hostile to the largely Spanish-speaking immigrants who have moved to the area in search of jobs and stability.
Lately, this medium-sized town near the borders of Iowa and South Dakota feels like the cultural crossroads of America under Donald Trump.
Brink doesn’t bother to say hello to the nonwhite kids on his bus route, Miller writes, because they are strangers to him. They don’t belong here, Brink informed Miller, and they never should have left their homes in Mexico or Central America to come to Worthington. In Brink’s view, these kids are hogging resources needed by local residents.
Miller notes that in recent years, Worthington has received “more unaccompanied minors per capita than almost anywhere in the country, according to data from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).” This has led to a 30 percent increase in Worthington’s student population since 2013, causing district officials and teachers to squeeze more students—many of whom require assistance learning English or have suffered trauma en route to the United States—into fewer spaces. All while efforts to increase public funding have failed.
This could be chalked up to nothing more than a classic battle between old and new, white and nonwhite. But Brink’s resistance, and that of his fellow area farmers, to the recent school bonding requests has been helped along by a notorious outsider, Paul Dorr.
Dorr is an anti-public school crusader who has been traveling the Midwest for years, deploying scare tactics and false information to defeat local referendums. In Worthington, he has been hired by a group Brink belongs to, Worthington Citizens for Progress, to help divide the community against itself.
Through a plethora of fake news stories that Donald Trump himself would likely admire, Dorr, who has a history of burning books he objects to, has helped turn local farmers against any increase in local property taxes. One farmer believed her new tax burden would rise to somewhere around $30,000 per year, should the referendum pass.
Actually, as Minnesota Public Radio reporter Alex Baumhardt points out, the farmer would end up paying “$1,700 more per year on land parcels worth $4.5 million, which would total more than $30,000 over the life of a twenty-year bond.” Further, a 2017 Minnesota law provides a tax credit to farmers whose land ownership requires them to shoulder a larger than average share of local school district costs.
Facts like these have their place, but hate and mistrust are easier messages to spread. Although Baumhardt’s report notes that towns typically end up passing their referendums once Dorr collects his cash and moves on, it requires a fair bit of healing first.
In Worthington, Brink and his fellow anti-referendum crew are waging war not just on tax increases, but also on immigrants. And not just any immigrants, but on undocumented, vulnerable ones—many who have arrived alone, sometimes pregnant or in debt to coyotes.
This seems like the worst of America. Fear of displacement is nothing new; neither is a race and class war stoked by the gentry to preserve their own wealth. But these developments have not gone unopposed.
A young woman named Andrea Duarte-Alonso has collected and published the stories of Worthington’s large Latino immigrant population, in part to push back against the fear and hatred she says Trump helped spread when he referred to Mexicans as “rapists” back in 2016.
Part of her motivation for collecting these oral histories is to counter news stories that depict anxious Worthington residents fighting one another over money, land, and resources. Their lives are far more complex and connected, Duarte-Alonso contends, then others might assume.
One of the immigrants she interviews is a woman named Teresa, who came to Worthington from Mexico so her daughter could have surgery for a cancerous mole and ended up staying.
“One comes to work, to fight, to get ahead to help also the family that one has in Mexico,” Teresa says. “I am already old, but my children here have a great future.”
And that is as American a story as one is likely to hear anywhere.